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Author: Paul Rogers

I am currently working as Head of Digital Marketing for GPMD, a London-based ecommerce web development and digital marketing agency. I have also previously worked in-house as a Digital Marketing Executive and for a PR agency.

Since its launch at the end of 2015, Magento 2 has been praised as a dramatic improvement on Magento 1.x versions (with significant changes in terms of usability, performance and functionality).

It has also been questioned for its premature release and lack of stability in core areas (such as checkout, product import payments etc). More recent feedback has been far more positive (especially on the last two releases), however lots of merchants are still struggling with the decision on whether to stick with Magento and, if so, when to migrate.

I was recently asked for advice on the best course of action for discontinued products for an ecommerce site and whether you should follow Google’s previous advice to let the pages 404.

I decided to write this piece up because it’s something that’s talked about a lot, but rarely written about. I’m half suggesting people to question bits of it, as it’s an area that is, in my opinion, pretty subjective.

In this specific scenario, the website was a very large fashion retailer, meaning that products are frequently discontinued (with no intention of bringing them back) at the end of each season.

Having worked almost exclusively with retail websites for the last four years, I’ve spent a lot of time analysing data for different channels and trying to attribute value to specific marketing campaigns and projects.

Whilst doing this I’ve found a number of fairly obvious (only when you really think about it) potential threats to everyday attribution that I wanted to share.